I recently received an email from Sigma Xi with various
news items. One of them mentioned a Hawking quote:

Science fiction is useful both for stimulating the
imagination and for diffusing fear of the future.

-- Stephen Hawking?

Now, Sigma Xi is generally a pretty reputable organization, but I
wondered: is a scientific organization really encouraging fear of the
future? Mind, I think a certain degree of concern about the future is
healthy, both individually and societally, and there is a longtradition in science fiction of writing novels about
terrifying futures. But Sigma Xi is usually upbeat about the wonders
of science and technological progress. Besides, there's a real
dissonance in that quote between becoming more creating and
imaginative, and becoming more afraid of the future. Maybe it was
intentional, but it seems very out-of-place. So, I started to wonder
whether this was really what Hawking said. Typing a few key words
into Google, I looked at where else this quote showed up.

According to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, "science fiction is
useful both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear
of the future." Interest in science fiction may affect the way
people think about or relate to science...

ERIC, which is some sort of database of internal government reports,
agrees:

According to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, "science fiction is
useful both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear
of the future." Indeed, several studies suggest that using science
fiction movies as a teaching aid can improve both motivation and
achievement.

So, maybe Hawking really does encourage being afraid of the future?
Well, here was the third and final reference to this quote that I
found, from (of all places) an unofficial transcript of a Larry King Live interview:

HAWKING: I think science fiction is useful, both for
stimulating the imagination and for defusing fear of the
future. But science fact can be even more amazing. Science fiction
never suggested anything as strange as black holes.

So, it looks like this quote comes from a live TV interview. I don't
know whether the different interpretations come from different
transcripts (this is the only one I can find); defused and
diffused are similar enough that it would be easy for either
one to be reasonable -- and IIRC, he speaks through some sort of
speech-generating machine, which would just make it easier to
misunderstand him. But given that Hawking is a crazy-science-guy, I
suspect that he would rather defuse fear of the future than spread
it around (even if it became more diffuse as it was spread), and that
the transcript above is what he meant to say. In which case, I wonder
about the versions of the quote that I found everywhere else. Didn't
anyone do a double-take when they were typing up those papers, Web
pages and news items?

Of course, there is a third possibility, which I rather like: the
quote could be a play on words, a sort of slant pun (a phrase
that I just invented, which is the funnier cousin of a slant rhyme). What's particularly cool about this particular
ambiguity is that (a) both sentences are sensible, (b) they have
related but opposite meanings, and (c) somewhat oddly, I agree with
both of them: science fiction is good at defusing unwarranted fear of
the future, while also diffusing fear where it's entirely warranted.
I doubt Hawking was going for the double meaning, but it's a nice
thought.

And for the inevitable people who can't figure out what this blog
entry is about, here's a hint: